into his place on the scaffold and seize
the colour-tubes and brushes with such rapidity there was no possibility
of stopping him. They shouted lustily to the painter, who came back just
in time to see the baboon paint over for the second time King Melchior,
the white horse and the scarlet saddle-cloth. The sight was like to move
poor Buffalmacco at one and the same time to laughter and tears.

He went off to the Bishop and thus addressed him:

"My Lord Bishop, you are good enough to admire my style of painting; but
your baboon prefers a different. What need to have had me summoned here,
when you had a master painter in your own household? It may be he
lacked experience. But now he has nothing left to learn, my presence
here is quite unnecessary, and I will back to Florence."

Having so said, the good Buffalmacco returned to his inn, in great
vexation. He ate his supper without appetite and went to bed in a very
dismal frame of mind.

Then the Lord Bishop's ape appeared to him in a dream, not a mere
mannikin as he was in reality, but as tall as Monte San Gemignano,
cocking up a prodigious tail and tickling the moon. He was squatted in
an olive wood among the farms and oil-presses, while betwixt his legs a
narrow road ran alongside a row of flourishing vineyards. Now the said
road was thronged with a multitude of pilgrims, who defiled one by one
before the painter's eyes. And lo! Buffalmacco recognized the countless
victims of his practical jokes and merry humour generally.

He saw, to begin with, his old master Andrea Tafi, who had taught him
how men win renown by practice of the arts, and whom in return he had
befooled again and again, making him mistake for devils of hell a dozen
wax tapers pinned on the backs of a lot of great cockroaches, and
hoisting him in his bed to the joists of the ceiling, so that the poor
old fellow thought he was being carried up to heaven and was in mortal
terror.

He saw the wool-carder of the _Gooses Head_, and his wife, that notable
woman, at the spinning-wheel. Into this good dame's cooking-pot
Buffalmacco had been wont every evening to throw big handfuls of salt
through a crack in the wall, so that day after day the wool-carder would
spit out his porridge and beat his wife.

He saw Master Simon de Villa, the Bolognese physician, to be known by
his Doctor's cap, the same he had pitched into the cesspool beside the
Convent of the Nuns of Ripoli. The Doctor ruined his best velvet